ESRC Seminars
ESRC seminar series “Changing forms of professional responsibility: Exploring workplace pedagogies in transitions”.
This ESRC-funded series of six seminars, organised by Sue Kilminster, University of Leeds, Tara Fenwick, University of Stirling, and Miriam Zukas, Birkbeck, University of London aims to develop and use theoretical frameworks to understand transitions in professional responsibility. The series will explore how social workers, doctors, psychotherapists and police officers negotiate transitions in various phases of their practice. Transitions may be linked to induction, leadership or other changes in professionals’ roles and identities. Transitions are also prompted through changing knowledge, technologies and values. Transitions may be invoked by external pressures: restructured arrangements of practice, regulatory changes, funding cuts and forth. How professionals manage transitions and learn to make wise decisions within them can have serious implications for patients, clients and/or members of the public affecting risk, effectiveness, work culture and relations with colleagues as well as clients. The seminar series will ask how we can better understand what happens in such transitions and how we can better support processes of professional learning as professionals navigate these transitions. The seminars will involve professionals themselves, policy makers and those who regulate the professionals, as well as researchers.
One of the unusual features of this series is that we aim to develop existing work in innovative and original ways by moving between general and specific professional issues and using each to inform the other. The theoretical approach offers a challenge to current understandings about transitions and will be scrutinised and developed by involving practitioners, policy makers and regulators as participants as well as including academics in each one.
If you would like details about further seminars, please contact Sue Kilminster (s.kilminster at leeds dot ac dot uk) to be put on the mailing list.
Seminar 1
(18 April, 2011 at Birkbeck, University of London) focused on theorising transitions in levels of professional
responsibility.
Seminar 2
(28 June, 2011 at University of Stirling) focused on police.
Seminar 3
(19 September, 2011 at University of Leeds) focused on medicine.
Seminar 4
(14 November, 2011 at Birkbeck, University of London) focused on psychotherapy.
Seminar 5
(1 February 2012 at University of Stirling) focused on social work.
Seminar 6
(11 June, 2012 at University of Leeds) will develop overall and profession specific syntheses and plan dissemination activities.
(28 September 2012 at University of Leeds) ‘Implications for practice’
